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Nineteenth Century Design and Printing Technologies : A Handbook lore vs history Design itself is a changing construct : rhetoric, engineering, drawing (desegno vs colore) – it participates in all of these. Graphic means any kind of mark, typically clean and easily reproduced and understood. Design is always about something else, points elsewhere beyond itself to its users, practitioners and, for every instance of design, the purpose it serves. The question arises: Are we looking for design "history" here, or "lore"? Lore is what's useful – a shared experience or tradition, a code (of inclusion and exclusion), a shorthand – whereas history is an explanation, analytical, assumes theorizing. No answers here just essays, after a quick dip in some of the literature. the exercise Instructor will help on finding sources. writing Center visit a good idea. Essays are gathered by 8 March and put on faculty server Each student collects all contributions, writes a preface that provides some sort of overview or argument, and designs a handbook that contains all; must include title page, table of contents, and be assembled into a "handbook" or other finished package. Andrew Bablo Color printing in the nineteenth century consisted of three main processes. The first process was relief printing on wood and metal. The second was chromolithography, and the third was a mixed process based on intaglio and relief printing. All of these methods could be mixed in some ways more than others but these three processes had the widest commercial application. Color was used in printed books and other materials long before the 19th century. Some examples are medieval prints, illuminated books and manuscripts, and scientific texts like anatomy books as well. These items were often very important or expensive luxury goods. The first color prints were crude and registration of individual color prints was difficult. People like William Savage used as many as thirty wooden blocks in the 1822 to create his impressive demonstration book titled Practical hints on decorative printing. Its colors were rich and it had many more workings than previous color prints. Charles Knight used wood engravings in 1838 to create Illuminated Printing, which had fewer colors than Savage's, but offered the advantage of faster production. George Baxter created the "Baxter Process" in the 1830s and 40s using copper or steel intaglio key plates to print main features of the print followed by colored wood blocks. Lastly Chromolithography was used as a means of replication pictures and paintings as it had excellent tonal qualities. This process led right into the development of photo reproduction as did a few others that became more popular with the introduction of the photograph. Halftones and four-color processes in the 1880s were very popular for replicating photography, as photos were fairly new and widely demanded by consumers. Little dots of different colored inks in rosette-like patterns made up four-color processes and proved to be very effective – the process is used to this day. sources Michael Twyman. Printing 1770-1970: an illustrated history of its development and uses in England. The British Library, 1998 other Bamber Gascoigne. Milestones in colour printing 1457-1859 : with a bibliography of Nelson prints. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 1997 Otto M. Lilien. Jacob Christoph Le Blon, 1667-1741: Inventor of three- and four colour printing. (Bibliothek des Buchwesens 9 (1985)). Includes reprint of the original edition of Coloritto published by LeBlon 1725 in London. Color Printing in the Nineteenth Century ¶ An Exhibition at the Hugh M. Morris Library, University of Delaware Library (1996).
Peter Vachon The success of relief printing and movable type created its own bottleneck in the 19th century; it was too slow. Throughout that century the seeds of its own replacement were being sown in the form of lithography. Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798, was the first substantially new printing process since the invention of relief printing in the fifteenth century. It involves putting an oil-based image on the surface of a smooth piece of limestone. Acid burned the image onto the surface; gum arabic, a water-soluble solution, was then applied, sticking only to the non-oily surface and sealing it. Using rollers, ink was applied to the surface adhering only to the oily surfaces. The image was then transferred to paper. Artists used lithography to create duplicates of masters and to create their own original works. The most popular use of lithography was poster design. In a competitive world it challenged the letterpress because of its graphic medium, which allowed a more illustrated approach to public communication. However, throughout this period the maximum speed of printing a lithographic image on a hand press was 100-120 prints an hour. This process couldn't compete with the productivity of relief printing. Senefelder predicted lithography would not be perfected until the impression can be produced wholly by good machinery. In 1851 Austrian engineer Georg Sigl created a machine that incorporated rollers that damped and inked the stones automatically. This increased production from 100-120 prints an hour to 800-1,000 prints an hour. The only answer to mass-producing lithographic images was removing the stone. They soon replaced the stones with metal plates. Practiced by Robert Barclay in 1875, he printed from a litho stone then transferred it over to the surface of a cylinder covered with specially prepared cardboard, from which the image was transferred over to sheets of metal (this is where we get the term "offset" printing). It wasn't until 1903 when Ira W. Rubel discovered how to print from a rubber cylinder, which allowed printing on paper. Lithographic Color The lithographic process was used to create multi-color printed images. One process, chromolithography consisted of layers upon layers of color prints to create a full colored product. Eventually, the halftone printing process was adapted for three and four color printing. sources Michael Twyman. Printing 1770-1970: an illustrated history of its development and uses in England. The British Library, 1998 role of lithography in the development of printing technology ¶ Dennis Bryans (2000) A seed of consequence indirect image transfer and chemical printing : the role played by lithography in the development of printing technology, PhD dissertation, Swinburne University of Technology, National School of Design.
Production of lithographed books started only shortly after the invention of lithography itself. In Munich in 1798, Alois Senefelder invented lithography while searching for a new way to print letters, unaware that his new process would lead to a new printing style for books. Lithography presented new options for page and book composition. Lithographed books were a dead end in many ways. Lithography was first used for music, maps, circulars, some jobbing printing, and to produce multiples of artists' drawings. Text took a backseat in lithographic books since it was often handwritten, thus awkward and less legible compared to the conventional typeset books. (Authors feared readers wouldn't buy lithographic books because they looked more like handwritten books than the books readers were used to.) It was also used for small-scale pamphlets in small editions, largely because actual production on the press was slower than with conventional letterpress. Lithographed books have disadvantages and advantages relative to letterpress. In lithography, there are no ready-made letterforms causing costly problems when corrections needed to be made. Moreover, lithography could not keep up with letterpress when, later, powered machines replaced the hand press. Speed output of lithographic books varied according to the kind of image, quality of print, and size of the stone being printed. Yet it offered advantages. With lithography, anything that could be written on stone, could be printed; not so with letterpress, where you were limited to what characters you had, and by the practical requirements of lead typesetting. Lithography made it possible to integrate text and images in new ways for reproductions in multiples. New possibilities included music alongside text, mathematical and chemical symbols, complex configurations of text, rule work and diagrams, complex diagrams, and integration of diagrams or pictures and text. In lithographic prints, only one pass through the press will produce pictorial effects and text. Lithographed books were almost a niche market in the nineteenth century. Vanity books were produced for private distribution in limited numbers usually only for friends. Institutions printed books with graphical and/or mathematical elements distributed only within the institution (such as instruction manuals). Many types of books were produced because it would have been too difficult using the traditional letterpress method; non-linear configurations of text and rule work in books, works requiring large uses of non-Latin characters, and books involving integration of music along with text. Few books were produced using lithography because the author was interested in the new process. Lithographed books were always marginal, yet the basic principle of lithography – resists and ink would used in offset printing, developed in 1903, where a flexible metal plate replaced the lithographic stone. Lithographed books prefigured the more complex relationship of text and images that we are familiar with now. The compositions difficult to achieve in letterpress were easier when using the lithographic process. sources Michael Twyman. Early Lithgraphed Books : a study of the design and production of improper books in the age of the hand press, with a catalogue. London: Farrand Press & Private Libraries Association, 1990
Adel Shakir Since the beginning of the photography in late 1800's, constant developments and experiments took place. Such research led to the development of the Half-Tone Process. Half-tone process – process whereby photographs may be printed with text in a book, newspaper or magazine by relief or by lithography. It was called half-tone because it allowed the reproduction of tones between black and white. Applying a principle discovered by William Henry Fox Talbot. The half-tone uses a fine screen to break up the surface of a print into tiny dots whose size accords with the darkness and lightness of a picture. The screen is printed on a metal plate covered with gelatin mixed with bichromate. The gelatin hardens and the non-printing areas of the image are etched with acid. The half-tone process was known and used sporadically before the late 1880's, when it was perfected, allowing newspapers routinely to include photographs. (Marien 2002: 498) In the early 1900s it became much easier, cheaper and so much more faster to use half-tones than to have a person do the same job. Many of course took advantage from it and became wealthy. Artists especially benefited from it since they would not need a second hand nor pay for it! The rebirth of advertising was here, millions of things, illustrations covered the streets. People were simply taken away by the half-tone effect, now urban life didn't seem so quiet. The regular newspapers now contained images and lots of them that used to be an occasional line drawing. Redesign took place as well now that it was so much easier to reproduce. News photographers became world travelers, their job was to shoot possible incidents, political figures, anything that's worth an eyecatch. The photographs were then rushed to press by any means necessary, ether by land or sea. Charles-Guillaume Petit is the inventor of one of the most important printing techniques, that of transforming the halftones of a photograph into a system of regularly spaced points or cross-hatching that produce printed surfaces of varying dimensions. Petit called the system "halftone, engraving" (similigravure). It is one of the first techniques to produce halftone shading without departing from traditional printing methods. The set of points, or screen, was made from an asphalt produced image (image below). 
Petit explains: Using a knob mounted on my engraving machine, I incised zigzag lines of alternating points into a copper plate and I pulled an engraved print from this master plate. The points were black on a white paper background. I photographed it reducing it about a third. With the negative I made a positive image using asphalt on copper plates later to be engraved (a and b). The plates bore a matrix of evenly spaced points (b) and could serve many purposes. All that needed to be done when an order came was to cover them with bichromate gelatine, to make a negative of a given subject (c) and to engrave using iron perchloride which filtered through the gelatine layer as is done in helioengraving (e). (source for image and extract) sources Mary Warner Marien. Photography A Cultural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002 David Clayton Phillips (1996) Art for Industry's Sake: Halftone Technology, Mass Photography and the Social Transformation of American Print Culture, 1880-1920 PhD dissertation, Yale University (Dissertation Director: Alan Trachtenberg).
PICTURE REPRODUCTION : wood engravings, etchings, halftones Justin Rello In the late nineteenth century, Halftones would herald a new era of efficient, cheap, and accurate printing the likes of which had not been witnessed before, though its effects were far more reaching than one might have believed. And it was at this time of revelation that Halftones managed to completely marginalize the utilization of Wood Carving and Etching. Prior to the development of Halftones, the primary methods through which one would mass-produce visual prints were Woodblock and Etching. Though these two practices varied in some areas, their underlying characteristics remained the same. At their core, both processes required a skilled, trained artist to create the actually carvings, and as such their creation was painstakingly slow and expensive process. During the reign of these two methods, the cost of printing images far outweighed that of typographic, but that was soon to change with the discovery of the proverbial "Holy Grail", Screen Halftones. Salvation, or perhaps damnation, was soon to be found however in the form of the Screen Halftone. Departing from the practices of its forefathers, Halftones no longer concerned themselves with a carving to reproduce an image. Instead, when utilizing Screen Halftones, one would reduce and image to perhaps the simplest of markings, a dot. Hundreds upon hundreds of dots would be utilized in conjunction with the natural processes of the human eye to produce a far more accurate depiction with much less time and finally, less expense. It was during this time that the cost of producing images dropped far below that of type, and its subsequent effects would be far reaching. Finally, the longer sought after method of cheaper, faster, and more accurate reproductive printing had been produced, but at what cost? While it is true that the development and implementation of Screen Halftones did herald in an era of simply put "better" printing, so to did it bring with it a rather far-reaching and damaging effect. Suddenly and almost without warning, hordes of skilled and trained carving artists suddenly found themselves unemployed, made obsolete by a technological development that simply did not require their craft. Also, with the implementation of Halftones, artistic work no longer had to be created with concerns that specifically dealt with reproduction. Ultimately, the evolutionary process from Woodblock and Etching to Halftones was one of the most profound and lasting transitions ever to shatter the Printing world. sources Michele H. Bogart. Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. University of Chicago Press, 1995 Estelle Jussim. Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1974 Ellen Mazur Thomson. The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870-1920. Yale University Press, 1997
John Hill, Jr. Letterpress was very much an integral part of early American life. Though invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Europe, the effects that Letterpress had are monumental in America. Just to be able to get a paper with the news and pictures of the president or any other such jargon were a help with living in the wilderness. The process and the time associated with Letterpress was very much a tedious task at best. This consisted of manually finding and taking the type out of its case. Each font, and then font size, had its own case. Then the type was placed into a stick, basically just cast iron or steel to hold the line of type in place, until the line was complete. Then the type was justified or spread out evenly throughout the line. After the job was set, it was put into a on a stone, in a chase and quoins were used to lock the type into place. At this point it was given to a pressman. The job was only finished as fast as the printer could set the type. I mention the process to show that innovation was sorely needed. The actual presses were still very much archaic, leftovers if you will from the dark ages, still based on wine pressing and paper making techniques. In the late 1800’s several inventors continued to struggle to allow composition work to keep up with the newer press technologies. Though unsuccessful with any automated type setting machines, in 1886 a German immigrant installed his invention—the Linotype—at the New York Tribune. His name was Ottmar Mergenthaler. This invention took the world by storm. By 1890, newspapers and book publishing plants all over the country had purchased this miracle machine. Within a few years, virtually all of the major newspapers replaced handset type with Linotypes, the first successful attempt at automation in the printing industry. Boosted by even faster, more efficient presses, printing production increased fantastically. The printing industry flourished. Daily newspapers replaced weekly newspapers, and new publications popped up all over the country. A flood of books rolled off the presses in astounding numbers. Country weeklies changed from four-page editions to eight or sixteen pages. Ever more workers were needed to cope with the greatly increased volume of work. As printers perfected their skills on the Linotype, they minted fresh jargon that dealt with the new "mills." Mergenthaler's invention was an engineering marvel. Very complicated, with as many as 5,000 moving parts, the Linotype was also reliable and easy to maintain, since components were interchangeable—a relatively new idea at that time. In fact, it was so well designed that when the Linotype went out of production nearly a century later, the design was virtually unchanged. Ottmar Mergenthaler would have easily recognized the latest model, and would have little trouble repairing it. The brass matrices, which cast the lines of type, the spacebands, which spaced between words and the cams, which operated the marvel were essentially the same as those used on early versions of the machine.
PROLIFERATION OF MESSAGE MEDIA Sarah Meyers The proliferation of message media in the nineteenth century could be attributed to the amount of messages from the rise of immigration and urbanization. There was more of a need to communicate these messages at a distance. This was assisted by new technological advances including high-speed presses, the linotype, and halftone photo reproduction. Media such as newspapers and magazines were able to reach audiences like never before. People previously cut off from urban society were suddenly informed of the qualities of ladies and gentlemen, and all the ways to become ladies and gentlemen through behavior, including purchase behavior. Advertising magazines suddenly had images as well as descriptions showing high society. More than 500 periodicals were published in the United States alone in the first quarter of the century. Some of the outstanding monthlies were Godey's Lady's Book, Graham's Magazine, The Southern Literary Messenger, and Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper's Weekly advertised everything from Dooley's yeast powder to The Soldier's bulletproof vest. Godey's Lady's Book editor Sarah J. Hale informed women of proper etiquette and values. Children's magazines such as The Slave's Friend, The Youth's Companion, and The Little Corporal provided rural children with reading material and information on subject outside their farm culture including astronomy, geography, and commerce. McClure's Magazine was a political magazine bringing muckraking to the American public. Magazines flourished and existed forth in a variety of topics. Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist (1911-1980), saw media as "make happen agents" rather than "make-aware" agents, as systems "similar to roads and canals, not as precious art objects or uplifting models of behavior." (link). Just as goods could now be more easily distributed by these roads and canals, so too the information about these goods , which was essential to creating desire for them, also needed to be distributed. Print media was the means for creating the desire for the good through advertising. The editors of Godey's Lady's Book wanted women to have certain etiquette and the means to standardize this across the United States was through the message media of their magazines. With the proliferation of message media came increased need for the production of typesetting and illustrations. There was more of a demand for image reproduction through wood engraving, and eventually half tone printing. The increase in advertising surged a desire to achieve efficency, and more rapid production. Message media, like newspapers and magazines, spread across the United States in the nineteenth century full of advertisments and information. further reading Richard M. Ohmann. Selling culture : magazines, markets, and class at the turn of the century. London & New York : Verso, 1996. Amanda Griscom. "McLuhan's Message," in Trends of Anarchy and Hierarchy: Comparing the Cultural Repercussions of Print and Digital Media at Kaity Rupert Package design is multifunctional. It is a means of protecting the contents of a package and a canvas on which to promote the products beneficial information. The design of a package allows the buyer to experience the product and create a certain perception about it. Until the end of the nineteenth century, packaging still meant wrapping the item with paper and tying it with string. The purpose of this packaging was used for efficient transportation. While many packages continue to be used for this purpose, packaging is now much more about communication with costumers than it is about transporting goods. The first modern packaging seems to have started in London around the turn of the seventeenth century. Brand names had long existed (the medicine industry, for example) prior to the eighteenth century. It was in the last decades of the nineteenth century that consumer goods progressed into a profitable investment. Cosmetics, cereals, canned food, and personal hygiene products were in high demand and with new technologies to mass produce these items, came a demand for package design. Paperboard, glass, and metal were easily produced in large quantities. By the end of the nineteenth century there had come into play an entire industry of highly specialized machinery to put many kinds of products into cans, boxes, jars, and tubes. Package design had the effect of allowing costumers to minimize human interaction in the marketplace. Customers could get information from package labels that they had previously relied upon the shopkeepers for. Shopping became less time consuming and less of an emotional drain when shoppers no longer felt compelled to share personal information with the grocer each time they visited his store. Packages were especially attractive to people arriving in cities because labeled packaged could often be trusted more than unknown shopkeepers. Over time, the ability to trust packages gave way to customer confidence, and trust became less of a selling point. Manufacturers began targeting the emotions of customers in an attempt to produce sales. Breakfast foods, for example, were now marketed to make parents feel good when serving them to their children. Nowadays, the designs on packages seem to be battling for the rights to gain the customers attention. This type of package design engages us consciously and unconsciously. They are physical structures but at the same time they are about illusion. They appeal to out emotions as well as our reason. sources Glenn Porter. "Cultural forces and Commercial Constraints: Designing Packaging in the Twentieth Century United States." Journal of Design History 12 (1999) Thomas Hine. The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995
Devin Toye They were aiming for speed and grace in printing. What they were looking for was an inhuman machine to pump out thousands upon thousands of prints an hour, a day. It would make things easier. It would make this print consuming society quicker and more affordable. What they wanted was perfection. The human hand is the most valuable tool a man can own. This was the first press. Messages stamped with human appendages. The humans then grew a foreign limb called the lever and that served us very well in making things a bit faster for a long time. This is the way it was in all realms of human activity, from war to farming, from deforestation to printing. Fast-forward to the 19th century and the mutation of printing, after the sufferings it went through under the control of a certain prosthetic human limb called the lever. Enter Augustus Applegath and William Cowper, partners at a bank. Whose job it was to find ways to beat forgers. Incidentally while working for the bank in 1816, Cowper patented curved stereotype plates that would wrap around cylinders. The new press was fast. It pressed 2,400 impressions per hour. The bank did not support this patent. Before this was a double cylinder steamed-powered press, which only pressed 1,100 per hour. The job at the bank was a job to save humanity. We were now making progress. The shape of a polygon appeared stapled to a familiar name, Augustus Applegath. The type formed the polygon and the polygon made the impression. That shape began type revolving machines and the development of the modern rotary. But this polygon was not perfect. What print was looking for was a smoother; faster design for large output printing. Richard March Hoe saw this clunky misshapen press and in 1846 he created his first version of a rotary press. Mr. Hoe could fit a certain amount of type around a cylinder, which was inked by doubled automated rollers, while other moving rollers made the contact. This raised the number of impressions being made by the hour. The cylinder was the key. The circle is the messiah of shapes. The press still had all the elements of the previous press. Now the missing link has been found. 
Fig 1, R. M. Hoe, Printing Press, U.S. Patent No. 5,199, Patented July 24, 1847 Skipping a couple thousand chapters in this gigantic book of man's evolution, we must eventually cut to the chase. In 1915, the rotary press started being used ordinarily for printing newspapers in Chicago. It weighed nearly 25 tons. It could produce a 6-10 page newspaper at the rate of 20,000 copies an hour. It was only until after 1926 that the rotary press was out of its experimental stages, and advancing through this period. Destroying the competition and out doing any other printing practice, the rotary press could print 6,000,000 per day. Where the flat press could only print 1,600,000 per day. It is said, that paper goes through some rotary presses at 20 miles per hour. The way a rotary press actually prints is that the impressions, which are set to print, are curved around a cylinder so that the printing can be done on long continuous rolls of paper, cardboard, plastic, or any other printing materials needed. Today, there are three main types of rotary presses: offset, rotogravure, and flexography. While the three types use cylinders to print, they vary in their method. Offset lithography uses a chemical process, which an image is chemically applied to a plate. Gravure is a process in which small cells or holes are etched into a copper cylinder, which are then filled with ink. Flexography is a relief system in which a raised image is created on a typically polymer based plate. The rotary press process involved inking, wiping and printing as the cylinder revolved and a large roll of paper was pulled through the printing apparatus. Since typically two plates were on the cylinder, each revolution of the cylinder produced two plates of lets say stamps. For example, in the production of some prints that used 170 plates each revolution would produce 340 stamps. The rotary press became mankind's biomechanical arm, which could rifle out millions of rounds of prints a day. It eventually migrated off the human body and it started to inhabit factories in every city. This was a great achievement for humanity. With these new independent machines, information could flow through the streets and seep into the crevasses of our brains at an amazing rate. This information and documentation of knowledge was instantaneous and furthered the growth of this world's intelligence. sources James Moran. Printing presses; history and development from the fifteenth century to modern times. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973 R. M. Hoe. "Printing Press." U.S. Patent No. 5,199 (1847) Although the silk screening process hasn't been around for very long, the concept goes back to The Mediterranean Sea. Stenciling was a very popular art form, in Japan especially, for clothing, fabrics and even wallpaper. It was the most effective method, at the time, to aid in repeating a design accurately, over and over; that still holds true today when dealing with hand-done repetition. According to historians silk printing may have originally started somewhere between Mesopotamia and Phoenicians. It was there that a technique for reproducing patterns was started. Although it wasn't completely similar to screen printing, it still played a large part in laying the foundation for the techniques to come. The original prints were done by cutting designs out of a thicker weight paper, laying them down on the material you want to decorate and paint ink or paint over the stencil so that it only passes through the re-cut holes. It was nearly 18 centuries later, in Japan's capital (Kamakura) that this method of reproduction was dramatically improved upon. The same idea applied as far as the cutting of thick paper to produce an appealing pattern or story. Instead of painting directly over the paper stencil, they would make a screen out of human hair and glue the cut out design to the hair. This made it easier to make designs without limitations. In using the screen made of hair to hold the stencil together they no longer had to worry about making sure the paper remained intact throughout, they could now add and remove separate pieces without having to start over. The screen would then be stretched over a wooden frame. When applying the pigment the thin hairs would ultimately become un-noticeable. This form of printing quickly caught on as more than a useful tactic but also as a well-respected art form. In the end of the 16th century it was further explored and by the Middle Ages it was widespread throughout Europe. It was only after this technique spread through England and France that artists started making wallpaper with a method called Pochoir, which in French means stenciling. Once this form of evolved stenciling came to America in the 18th century it was a worldwide phenomenon. Artists were soon using it to decorate furniture as well as clothing, posters and paintings. Soon enough, the process we all know as silk screen printing came about. In 1907 Samuel Simon from Manchester patented our current method for screen printing which proved to not only make it possible to have larger scaled projects but the screens were also much stronger than that of human hair. Screen/stencil printing has, in a way, evolved with the times. Starting with just cut paper to then figuring out how to mount the design onto something which would allow for the medium to pass through; ultimately ending up with a light sensitive chemical which would block out the paint in the same manner as the shapes of paper would. In using this chemical, screen printing became more realistic in appearance and required less manual labor and time then the traditional cutting of paper would. The photograph began to play a large role in screen printing. In a black and white photo, the light areas would block the ink from passing through. This would be possible with a procedure called "burning". When “burning” an image onto a screen the light would pass through only where there was white space causing the emulsion to harden. After "burning" the screen would be washed so that the emulsion, which wasn't cooked under the light, would be washed away. The result is a design in which certain elements are blocked out while others are colored in, Today screen printing is used for virtually everything that requires a uniform design, emblem, or logo. It's still the most effective way to mass-produce with the exception of newspapers books and magazines. sources Samuel Simon. "Improvements in or relating to Stencils." UK Patent 756 (1907)
David Butcher. "Pochoir at Curwen: the Artists and their Books." Matrix 8 (Winter 1988): 9-40 Frances Butler. "Pochoir: A Late Twentieth Century Revisit." Bookways 5 (October 1992): 19-24 Frances Butler. Colored Reading: The Graphic Art of Francis Butler. Berkeley: Lancaster-Miller Publishers, 1979 (includes color illustrations of New Dryads (are Ready for your Call, published in 1979; letterpress and pochoir) Elaine Evans Dee. Untitled essay in Kata-gami: Japanese Stencils in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Smithsonian Institution, 1979 Vance Gerry. "Pochoir: Practical Watercolour Stencilling of Illustrations & Designs for Books &c." Matrix 8 (Winter 1988): 21-28 Joyce Storey. The Thames and Hudson Manual of Textile Printing. London, 1974 Janet Waring. Early American Stencils on Walls and Furniture. 1937; Dover reprint 1968
Joe LoVasco Wood type has been used for centuries: wood is readily available and easy to curve and shape. Towards the middle of the 15th century wood block prints were used with metal type. This can be seen in the title pages of that era. Also around that time individual letters started to be carved out of wood, often times to make sand molds for metal casts. The wooden type was first carved by hand using chisels and gouges to rough out the shape of the type. After the roughing process gravers and fine files would apply the finishing touches to the type. The invention of the router increased the production of wooden type. David Bruce Jr. and Davis Wells perfected the first router in the middle of the 19th century. With the invention of the router laborers no longer needed to chisel out the shoulders and counters of the letters, greatly reducing the amount of man-hours it took to produce wood type. The finish of the wooden type was still performed by hand. In 1834 George Leavenworth combined the router with the pantographic principle, allowing for more precise cuts and faster production. The style of wood type stands out from that of lead type, with its large forms and eccentric style. Wood type was primarily used for display purposes. The typefaces were not made with the focus towards readability like that of lead type. They were intended to grab attention. With the 19th century came a high demand for advertisement. Lead type was too costly and heavy to perform the large printing applications need for poster and broadsides. Wood type allowed for the letters to be printed at a much larger size then lead. The other advantage to wood type is that there were a large variety of fonts. Because wood type was mainly used for display purposes. There was little need to have multiple pieces of each letter. To stay in business, therefore, type companies needed to produce a large variety of different faces. sources Rob Roy Kelly. American wood type, 1828-1900; notes on the evolution of decorated and large types and comments on related trades of the period. New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1969 Stephen O. Saxe. "The Romance of Wood Type." Fine Print (April 1983), reprinted in Fine Print On Type (1989)
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